Failure by design

So after a near miss with my luggage almost ending up in Miami. (got it delivered to the hotel, same day … amazing what first class does) I ended up in what I must say is the most luxurious hotel I have ever been in. Service so far has been excellent and the rooms are slightly short of amazing, only thing missing is a jacuzzi in my room.

So Time Square appears to be a fantasy land, created by the masterminds of consumerism and sprinkled in are the biggest banks in the world. Bear Stearns, Lehman bros, JPMorgan Chase, BoA and Morgan Stanley are all in Time Square … plus Reuters, Nasdaq and Dow Jones. This area is seriously beyond belief. The stores in the area are ridiculous and go beyond what I would normally expect out of a retailer. For instance, there is a Toys R’ Us that is multi level and has a ferris wheel inside, a Hersey Chocolate store, Virgin, MTV, Saks Fifth Ave and many more. The area seems like someone heard of this thing called the LCD and just went nuts. I would say that the first 50 feet of almost every highrise is covered in LCD display and/or paper advertising. As you walk down the street, your entire visual field is advertising and blinking lights. But I guess that is understandable, you need to recover some of the investment you made in the area since real estate must be insanely expensive.

Oh when I get back to Canada, I plan on posting a picture of the NYPD… biggest joke police station I have ever seen. It has neon lights, that flash and change color from pink to blue, and in a stupid cartoon font.

For a long time, I thought that democracies and using the ideas of the masses was the way to go. I thought that Reddit.com, Digg and Delicious were the new leaders of the internet. That by leveraging all the brains on the internet you can get awesome information and stuff that I like.

Lately, that has all been going downhill. I have been getting tired of stupid articles appearing at the top of these lists. Things such as silly pictures, unimportant news and the real killer is politics. Now, many people are going to say “Well maybe your not like everyone else, and your the weird one”. My response to you is “Yes”, and I realize that. When you go to a video about Huckabee, that is at the top of the list, and it has 2000+ positive reviews, but only 314 views, what does that tell you?

These services are meant to be a way for people to vote up informative articles, not a way for people to cast their opinion or influence on others. Huckabee congrats, you have a lot of followers/employees on reddit that blindly do your bidding. When I can start a thread about a purple photoshopped turtle shaped like a raspberry; and it gets to the top of the list, it is a sad day. That thread was shown over top of scientific discoveries, innovative software and services that may actually make a difference; but people would rather vote up a turtle than bother to read any of that other stuff.

This article inspired me to write this article, and voice some of the concerns with web 2.0 . By no means am I against web 2.0, but it does have it’s issues. When 1% of Wikipedia users make 50% of the edits; or the top 100 Digg users submit the top 44% percent of top stories, it speaks volumes of the general population.

Those top people are the entreprenuers, the business men, the early adopters. Everyone else is just happy with status quo, never really contributing to society. Now, a good friend of mine came up with an idea that I think is brilliant, even though it does cater to the top 1% of society. The knowledge sharing that goes on, with those people who own the businesses, the technology firms, the blogosphere and aspire to be great; will run the 21st century.

If only there was a way to get them all together.

Sidenote: Considering the name “A story about a friend of mine…” as the name of this blog.

Thiago Avila

 Ok, so we have a new statutory holiday, and it’s called family day. With Monday being the first ever official family day, I thought I would write a post about it. For people that missed the memo and are not Canadian, here is the announcement:

“QUEEN’S PARK — Premier Dalton McGuinty got back to work today on behalf of hard-working Ontario families by confirming that he would create a new statutory holiday this February called Family Day.

“There is nothing more valuable to families than time together. And yet it seems tougher than ever to find, with so many of us living such busy lives,” McGuinty said.”

Well but what is one day going to do? Is it really going to fix the divorce rate or encourage people to spend time with thier kids? The answer to these questions is most likely a blatant no. One day, is not going to change the status of a family. Here is what I see happening, kids on this day will congregate on malls everywhere. Parents will stay home from work just like every other holiday and do things around the house.

I personally think this is just an excuse to add a statutory holiday to the month of February, but I may be wrong. It isn’t a bad thing to make people thing of their family more often, but declaring a statutory holiday surely isn’t going to fix any problems. I think the massive money this holiday will cost in lost productivity and taxes, could be replaced by an ad campaign and subsidizing family events. Think of all the lost income from every single person being off for a day, and where that money could be put to use. I know many of you are going to say, but we get paid on that day… but do you? That money comes from somewhere and it is going to come from your pocket. Either in the form of higher priced goods, or delayed salaty increases.

Really, what happened to Sunday? When I was younger, and even now in many countries everything is closed on Sunday. Nobody works and everyone has the day off. With the spread of 7 day a week shopping and work schedules we seem to have lost that special time… that is the real problem

Well I was reading this article the other day by a Harvard economics professor writing about a woman who after taking a job paying $10000 more, wound up with much less disposable cash. The author goes on to show that the reasons for this are the loss of free health care coverage, child benefits, housing subsidies and tax breaks. (more…)